


Jigsaw

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Drama, Gen, Memories, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 05:16:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7963900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has gotten used to the missing pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jigsaw

Natasha got to Central Wakanda fourteen hours too late. She'd had to fly commercial to Joburg and that had cost her so much time, even spending an obscene amount for a direct flight. And then getting from Joburg to Central Wakanda... it had required far more than the usual visa check. She'd appealed straight up to the King and that had gotten her an audience, via cell phone, sitting in a quiet Tambo Airport whispering into her cell phone.

"Why?" 

"Why did I double-cross you or why do I need to visit?" she responded, understanding that she was negotiating from a position of weakness, even if she wouldn't appreciate the time constraints until it was too late. 

"The latter," T'Challa replied, his voice giving nothing away. "I understand the former now." 

She took a deep breath before saying anything because the first time would hurt. The first time always hurt. "You don't understand the former completely and that's why I need to visit." 

It was vague, hilariously so if she'd been inclined to find any humor in the situation, but she knew who she was dealing with and that he'd parse it properly. 

"He is under my protection," T'Challa warned, proving he'd at least understood part of it. 

"I mean him no harm," she assured. "Please, sir."

And that's when he'd gently explained to her that it was too late for the conversation she'd been waiting years to have. Barnes had gone back into cryostasis only a few hours ago, willingly and gratefully, and she could understand the decision even as it destroyed her. Barnes deserved his peace, more than anyone she could imagine, but he'd taken hers with him to a place she could not follow. 

"You may have the freedom of Wakanda, should you still seek it, on one condition," T'Challa finished after giving her a few moments to process the ache of the loss. "There is still something for you to do here."

Which was how she found herself standing in a lab watching a cryo-tank. Barnes looked at peace, both younger and older than she remembered him being. Of course, the Winter Soldier had been an ageless wonder, a man-machine with a secret human heart, but here he seemed... less eternal, more a prisoner of time. It made her ache for him when, up until now, she'd honestly been hurting just for herself. 

"I always understood," she said quietly to Steve, who wasn't literally frozen but might as well have been. He was like he'd been back at the start, withdrawn and aloof, operating on muscle memory and the hedged bet that nobody wanted to see anything more than Captain America in civvies. "To have the best parts of your past just out of reach. To know that the person who knew you best was choosing to run _from_ you than _toward_ you." 

This had been her visa to Wakanda, a promise to offer Steve the succor she'd sought for herself. To be a friend to him in deed as well as in word. She hadn't wanted to be that selfless, not when she still hurt so deeply, but there'd been a challenge in T'Challa's voice. A dare. For her to be a friend when it was no advantage to her. To be true when she'd been anything but to T'Challa. 

Steve, when she saw him, looked both older and younger than she remembered him being on the battlefield or even at Peggy Carter's funeral. He looked exhausted and heartbroken and yet somehow far more at peace than she was. He wasn't angry at Barnes and a part of her was, still. Because she was selfish and wanted her answers, apparently at any cost. 

"So you two were a thing," he said woodenly, no teasing salaciousness, not even the giddiness of curiosity. Steve's sense of humor was barbed and a little caustic, not for everyone, and it tended to startle people who were expecting Captain America's earnestness in not-good ways. Natasha loved that about him and hearing the flatness of his voice tugged at her. 

"Don't start, Rogers," she warned, aiming for playful and probably landing well short.

Steve gave her a ghost of a smile, but then his brow furrowed. "I just... I want something from then to have not been terrible for him. If in all of that horror, there was something, anything, that might not be hell for him to carry forward." 

Because of course Barnes remembered everything. She'd known that all along, or at least after he and Steve and Sam had let themselves be taken in. That flash in his eyes when he'd met hers. He'd remembered everything and she didn't and the envy burned. The _need_. Steve wanted the comfort of shared memories, but she wanted the parts of herself she hadn't been able to recover. She'd been shattered so completely by the Red Room time and again that the shards still hadn't all been picked up yet. And Barnes had gone into cryo carrying _so many_ of her missing pieces.

But here she was, against all of her instincts, trying to use what she'd already collected to be a person she wanted to be. Needed to be. There was no Red Room equivalent of generosity and she'd had to learn it the hard way, embarrassed over and over again because the very idea of giving something for nothing was anathema and unnatural. Selflessness wasn't a Red Room concept; without a self to sacrifice, it was just necessity. 

"Where we were," she finally answered Steve, "those words didn't mean what you want them to mean." There was no way to explain any of it to someone who hadn't been there. "But allowing for a loose translation, I'd like to think that he was. That we were."

They'd had moments, stolen over the years and hidden from the thieves who would take any shred of humanity from them both. Moments of joy, of pain, of ecstasy, of anger, of _peace_ and every single one of them was a sparkling jewel in her hoard of memories because it had meant that she'd _felt_ , that she'd been a person, and those jewels had been the treasure upon which she'd built her post-Red Room life. She'd come to understand that generosity and kindness and gentleness had been in her all along, still dusty from being buried so deeply, but present. 

Steve nodded. And then his smile turned real. The actual Steve Rogers smile, not the bland one Captain America displayed for public usage, was just as wry and off-kilter as the rest of him. "I'm glad it was you," he said. "I'm glad you had each other there."

She smiled back. Her actual real smile, not the cheshire cat grin of the Black Widow, was crooked and weak as a newborn colt because she hadn't had a lot of experience using it.

It would take her time to get over this desperate, aching disappointment. To accept that the holes in her memories -- in her heart -- would remain unfilled for as long as Barnes slept on. But those holes weren't as big as they'd once been and she'd learned to fill them with other things. She had a family with the Bartons and with them she built new memories and brushed the dust off of her humanity so that she was a person for herself and not a tool for others. She had a friend in Steve if she'd let him. Wanda... Wanda had been a cautiously eager little cousin, a chance for her to undo so much damage to them both, and the last few weeks had destroyed that relationship so profoundly that it might never recover. But she owed it to Wanda to try. She owed it to herself because learning to apologize for causing hurt was another skill she'd had to pick up way too late in life. 

She would survive, in other words, still missing the parts of herself she'd crave until they were hers once again but far more whole for understanding what was missing. 

"I am, too."


End file.
